The prospect of exploring “the enduring influence of Surrealism through the work of more than 50 women artists” filled me with high hopes in terms of repossession of the Feminine and reappraisal of Surrealism in the popular imagination. Art historians have only begun to scratch the surface of female artists written out of the original movement, relegated to roles of lover, wife or muse in the biographies of male artists. Dreamers Awake features “sculpture, painting, collage, photography and drawing from the 1930’s to the present day” including works by Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Claude Cahun, Edith Rimmington, Helen Chadwick, Louise Bourgoise, Alina Szapocznikow, Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas, Carina Brandes, Hayv Kahraman, Eva Kot’átková, Nevine Mahmoud, Penelope Slinger, Shannon Pool, Jo Anne Callis and Julia Phillips. Whilst I welcome and applaud exhibitions bringing marginalised and neglected work by women artists into greater public awareness, this show left me feeling conflicted about the nature of Feminine reclamation, particularly in relation to contemporary art/ life.

One of the problems I had with the exhibition was the overbearing emphasis on the female body, or rather the persistent disconnect between body, mind and the Feminine. On the one hand there’s a challenge to the image of women as objects of “masculine desire and fantasy”, often “decapitated, distorted, trussed up,” “fearsome and fetishized” as “other” in the hands of male Surrealists from the birth of the movement. Although this “fragmented, headless body of Surrealism” is a “vehicle for irony, resistance, humour” and freedom of expression in the hands of female artists in the exhibition, there is a tendency, particularly in the work of contemporary artists, to simply offer derivative nods to the body politic whilst continuing the patriarchal tradition of the headless woman. Whilst the show ranges well “beyond those who might identify themselves as surrealists”, the superficial nature of the influence (or curatorial connection) in some work left me questioning the universal ground-breaking media exclamations surrounding the show. Fortunately, there’s enough complex, intelligent and beautifully executed work connected to the body to compensate for the weaker, more obvious and mediocre elements of the show. Caitlin Keogh’s clumsy, derivative acrylics on canvas, Berlinde de Bruyckere’s basic assemblage sculptures or Gillian Wearing’s masked photographic portrait of model Lily Cole laden with illustrative symbolism are examples of work which didn’t engender critical changes in perception.

Rosemarie Trockel’s black and white digital print, reimagining Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde /The Origin of the World, is an example of an appropriated work which became interesting in spite of itself for the questions it raised. My initial gut reaction was to sigh and roll my eyes at the projection of fear onto an image of female genitalia. Placing an enormous black spider where the model’s pubic hair should be, even to reclaim one’s own body, sex or gender struck me as perilously dull. Effectively it’s a reduction of Feminine power to B-Movie Body Horror by depicting the female body as something dangerous or deadly. This associative trope has been used since the Book of Genesis as an instrument of shame, self-loathing and control, turning desire into the fallen or demonic Feminine other. If Trockel’s intention is irony, turning the male gaze and traditions of seeing back in on themselves, then this image doesn’t really succeed, because like the disembodied woman, the work is missing its head. Perhaps what it does do, (though only if the original image is known to the viewer) is point to a canonical image of the Feminine by a male artist to generate debate in the present. Or if the historical reference is unknown to the viewer (masculine or feminine), the print could also be seen as a positive confrontation with individual or collective fears. The curious irony is that Courbet’s title acknowledges timeless feminine creative/ biological and sexual power in a way that Trockel’s tarantulan image does not. Strangely his full-frontal honesty is more convincing in its rejection of idealism for realism and/ or masculine eroticism. It was and is an image that in 2017 still wouldn’t be reproduced in mainstream media on the grounds of obscenity. That the female body is still regarded as shameful, scandalous, shocking or dangerous is cause for debate in itself. If Trockel’s intent is humour and absurdity in her juxtaposition of the hairy spider, then it simply comes across as a laddish joke, especially in the context of her surrounding work which is equally unconvincing in its vision.

North Gallery, Dreamers Awake Exhibition Photograph by George Darrell, courtesy of White Cube

The claim that “by focussing on the work of women artists, Dreamers Awake shows how, through art foregrounding bodily experience, the symbolic woman of Surrealism is refigured as a creative, sentient, thinking being” just didn’t ring true to me in relation to some of the celebrated contemporary artists in the show. Sarah Lucas’s entwined chairs, The Kiss (2003, Wooden Chairs, varnish, cigarettes, wire, papier-mâché, acid free glue, leather cord) with a pair of breasts on the back rest and a cock and balls protruding from under the seat made from cigarettes is just a clumsy secondary school gag in comparison to a work such as Lee Miller’s Untitled photograph (Severed breast from radical surgery in a place setting 1 & 2, Paris, c.1929, modern gelatin silver prints) which shares the same gallery space. Then and now, Miller was way ahead of the times. Arguably her bodily experience though invisible in the shot is resoundingly present in the composition, with the raw meat/ severed breast served up on a plate with cutlery laid out for the viewer’s consumption. Many of her images cut through to the truth of lived experience, as a survivor of childhood trauma, former model and a war correspondent, Miller found liberation in the Art and life of photography. The juxtaposition of a domestic dinner setting with the disembodied breast is deeply subversive on a multitude of levels. The breast is disembodied, not as an erotic, maternal or biological focus but in the service of psychological, social and cultural interrogation. The two images served up side by side on a relatively intimate scale have tremendous power, in the equality of ideas and execution. Miller’s bloodied amputation is about as far removed from the neoclassical ideal of womanhood seen in the paintings of artists such as Magritte, Dali, De Chirico, Man Ray or projected in Cocteau’s 1932 film Blood of a Poet in which Miller appears in marble whiteout as an armless Neoclassical Goddess. Whilst narrowly fixated male artists of her generation were placing womanhood on a pedestal of passive desire, Miller fearlessly confronts us with an object which is anti-Beauty and savagely confrontational. Of the same generation, Dorothea Tanning’s statement “I warn you- I am not an object” immediately springs to mind. It’s a warning that like Miller’s photographic statement will never diminish in terms of power or relevance. Her emergence as a Surrealist artist equal to those who subjugated her to the role of muse is only just beginning. A pair of breasts, cock and balls made from cigarettes combined with a domestic chair is a lame and underdeveloped contemporary statement by comparison.

As I wrote in a previous post about the Surreal Encounters/ Collecting the Marvellous exhibition (SNGMA, June 2016) the real power and contemporary relevance of Surrealist Art lies in “reconnect[ing] the viewer with underlying passions, obsessions and political activism”, “a collective sense” “beyond dreamy, escapist fantasies and self-promotion”. Despite the easy conversion of the movement’s famous poster boys into merchandise, Surrealism is “rooted in the reality of global conflict, persecution, economic uncertainty, the rise of totalitarianism and coming to grips with who and what we are as human beings.” The premise of the exhibition does pick up on these undercurrents to some extent; “In a world preoccupied with the politics of identity, in which the advances of previous generations must be continually defended, we see the continued- even renewed- relevance of surrealist ideas and strategies.” I couldn’t agree more. What disappointed me were the misguided allegiances to a revolutionary movement playing in the shadows of the contemporary art market. I looked forward to seeing more evolved attitudes and refined visual language, taking a lead from female Surrealists of the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s and running with it. I certainly don’t mean “refined” in terms of gentility, but in terms of awareness and the propensity to fight (savagely if necessary) for a way of seeing based on the artist’s identity. The marginalisation of women artists as a homogenous group persists today, therefore this isn’t an exhibition of female Surrealists as much as it is a wakeup call in terms of what we bring to this work as viewers- individually and collectively. It is far too easy (literally and metaphorically) to buy into the “surreal” as a word/idea misappropriated and devalued by consumerist popular culture, creating dreamily vacuous or supremely self-indulgent Art in which the disembodied woman prevails. The best work in the show subverts what we have come to believe (or have been taught) about feminine power, Surrealism and the nature of creativity. In terms of Western society, embracing the unconscious goes hand in hand with acknowledging, confronting and liberating what is held in check beneath the surface for political or patriarchal reasons, which has less to do with sex and more to do with the balance (or inequity) of power.

In Eileen Agar’s Butterfly Bride (1938, Gouache and collage, 17 15/16 x 15 3/16 in) the blue Renaissance silhouette of a woman collaged on a ground of text, essentially the cut out of one age informing the reading of another, operates in a self-reflexive way. The encyclopaedic/ historical text, with reference to British colonies, historical rule and exploration works in counterpoint with the beauty and implied fragility of two exotic looking butterflies and the figure of the “bride”, anonymously blue and as collectable as a specimen in an age of discovery. Agar’s collages are frequently not just about the absurdity of images out of their elements, juxtaposed for 30 second amusement or shock value, but are far more texturally layered and sophisticated in terms of ideas and technique. Here the use of collage doesn’t feel random or automatic but considered in terms of dialogue between elements and the wider context of the work, transcending the time it was made. We may well question the freedoms afforded the Butterfly Bride in our own times.

There is also more than meets the eye in Breasts and Blade (1991, bronze, silver nitrate and polished patina, 11 x 32 x 16 in.) by Louise Bourgeois. What we see from the front is a sculpture composed of folds of flesh and five breasts like cushions with the pronounced geometry and provocation of protruding nipples. As you move to the side and back of the structure the overall form comes into view. The associations of comfort and domesticity in an everyday piece of furniture and the couch as a repository of the traditional female nude in art comes into play. Then you come to the switchblade behind, the threat of violence where you’d least expect it, a warning against stereotypes and reductive visions of femininity, maternity and eroticism. The artist’s sculpture is like a surreal beast not in an aesthetic but a revolutionary sense. It defies and changes your perception as you move around and find yourself in relation to it. It’s a tangible presence that nourishes, intrigues, seduces, challenges and menaces the viewer from the plinth. It isn’t fantastical but potently real, infinitely more complex than simple dualism or juxtaposition of opposing elements. The inference of soft comfort is rendered in the solidity of polished metal, the couch accommodating the whole family and its needs, equally a source of feminine disquiet. It lives and grows in the imagination as you experience it resoundingly in three (or more) dimensions, as one would expect from a Master of her own Art. The femininity here has multiple layers, views, identities and hidden capabilities against type- it’s a work which refuses to be boxed, with its own distinct voice. I never cease to be amazed, elated and inspired by the penetrating honesty of this artist’s work. Bourgeois brings much that is held beneath the surface into the light with immense courage, consummate skill, tenacity and feeling.

Shannon Bool’s exquisite monochrome tapestry The Five Wives of Lajos Bìrò (Wool tapestry, 98 1/16 x 156 11/16 in), Carina Brandes’ Untitled (2012, black and white photograph on baryta) a triangular, mythical inversion of Leda and the Swan and Hayv Kahraman’s T25 and T26 (2017, Oil on Linen 80 x 60 in) rooted in contemporary war on terror were similarly multifaceted engagements with the highly active nature of Surrealism, rather than giving passive aesthetic nods to it. Jo Ann Callis’s Untitled (Woman with Black Line) c.1976, archival pigment print, 22 1/8 x 19 7/16 in) further articulates this idea. It is an image of a woman photographed from above, with just her head and neck visible, face down in a pillow. There’s a drawn line like a seamed stocking along her back and forming the part of her hair, as if she could come apart, be peeled or shed her skin. Is she alive or dead in this sheath of image making? It’s a very intelligent image in terms of where the framing places the camera/eye/ viewer. We are placed in the uncomfortable position of being complicit in this bloodless, internalised crime scene, rendered with a deceptively soft palette of muted colour.

A work which perhaps summed up the exhibition for me was Alina Szapocznikow’s Autoportrait II (1966, Bronze, 8 1/16 x 10 ¼ x 4 5/16 in). On one side, there is a bird-like creature, composed of cast toes for the two feet, a mouth and chin and what look like outstretched wings, a playful, ingenious, hybrid fusion of a human/ bird free spirit that immediately made me smile. Then on the reverse, a different projection of Self, composed of just the cast mouth and upper breast, defining the “automatic” portrait of a woman. When viewed from this position the potentially shapeshifting woman is invisible. One seeing, the other being seen, one free, the other defined by her body, the living contradiction of what it is to be female in a world that hasn’t progressed far enough. Perhaps it was exactly that which disturbed and disillusioned me considering the exhibition as a whole. As I walked around Dreamers Awake I experienced the hope and exhilarating liberation of Art in terms of human expression, bringing what is hidden into awareness. Equally I saw the retrograde dictation of art by market values and a tendency to adopt traditionally masculine tactics to gain attention. I left this exhibition with faith in the tangible power of imagination and the extraordinary vision of female artists as an agent of positive change. I also saw what Surrealism and Feminism is not. That polarity reflects the wider world of Art/ life and the hard reality of creative work as ever more vital, resistant to or complicit with the political, economic and social extremities of the 21st Century.

Having just completed a review of the Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous exhibition for the TLS, I want to focus more specifically here on the Feminine elements of the show. One of the most satisfying aspects of this exhibition is the way that it reconnects the viewer with the underlying passions, obsessions and political activism of Dada and Surrealist Art; expanding what Surrealism can be in the popular imagination and challenging what collecting Art has become in the 21st century. Drawn from four extraordinary private collections; those of Roland Penrose (1900-1984), Edward James (1907-1984), Gabrielle Keiller (1908-1995) and Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, the range and quality of work, including key female Surrealists, is stunningly immersive. Jointly organised by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the unique juxtaposition of paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings, photographs, original prints, rare artist books, objects, design and ephemera, presents a golden opportunity for reappraisal of the movement and its masters. There are over 190 works on show by artists including; Salvador Dali, Reneé Magritte, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Mark Rothko, Man Ray, Henry Moore, André Masson, YvesTanguy, Eduardo Paolozzi , Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Hannah Höch, Eileen Agar, Valentine Penrose (nee Boué), Paul Delvaux, Francis Picabia, George Grosz, Joseph Cornell, Hans Bellmer, Hans Arp, Balthus (Bathazar Klossowski de Rota), Roland Penrose and Georges Hugnet.

I could easily devote an entire blog post to individual collectors, the content of their collections or individual artists who provided some of the highlights of the exhibition; the exquisite work of Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Eileen Agar or Max Ernst’s paintings, collages and rarely seen collage novels. This exhibition presents the opportunity for greater public awareness of lesser known work, part of a wider struggle for equality. Although recent scholarship continues to shed light on the work of female artists traditionally outside great male creator canon, I’m not convinced that this level of consciousness has really entered the cultural mainstream. The world of Art History is something of an academic bubble and people are too familiar in an age of celebrity with the artist as a marketable brand, rather than a creative force of intention or aspiration. The objectification of Art in an age of mass consumption (and an Art Market driven by ad men and oligarchs investing in their own shares) makes it hard to imagine that the value of Art can be anything other than the highest price paid at auction-until alternative ways of seeing are made publicly visible.

For me the beauty of Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous is the way that it does exactly that. We see by example that collecting Art isn’t necessarily driven by investment and status, but by love, collaboration and a desire for the common good. There is also a collective sense within the movement of qualities beyond dreamy, escapist fantasies and self-promotion, rooted in the reality of global conflict, persecution, the rise of totalitarianism and coming to grips with who and what we are as human beings. With Dada as it’s critically savage precursor, unlocking the imaginative, collective unconscious becomes a cultural imperative and a matter of survival. Although we equate Surrealism today with a penchant for bizarre, absurd juxtapositions of images and ideas, what is often forgotten is the outrage of its outrageousness; of striving to be anything but the respectable, compliant, banal mediocrity that enabled extreme militarism to thrive. Hitler’s regime, like all extremist ideologies past and present, understood extremely well what liberal, democratic governments too often forget: the value of culture, the capacity of the visual to focus intentionality and human aspiration for good or ill. It is not surprising that subversive, so called “degenerate art”, was identified as a serious ideological threat that had to be eradicated by the Nazis. The Surrealists were visibly defiant advocates of free love, thought and expression, qualities which remain radical even today. Crucially that radicalism encompasses how we see and define ourselves.

René Magritte’s La Représentation/Representation (1937, Oil on canvas laid on plywood SNGMA, Edinburgh, formerly collections of R.Penrose and G.Keiller, purchased 1990) reminds us of the ambiguous truth of seeing and attributing meaning. The Feminine is narrowly edited; “Woman” defined by her sex with the visual focus on the child rearing hips, abdomen and vulva which become an object framed in isolation. Minus the head (intellect), torso (heart) and active limbs, the female body is coolly divorced from its own consciousness; the frame hugging the sensuous contours of the amputated abdomen. However there is always more to a Magritte painting than meets the eye. Here he seemingly reflects the focus of a male gaze, but also suggests the artificiality of the man-made object in its two dimensional representation. The self-conscious framing device is alluring, but equally cerebral in terms of what it suggests about the feminine “other”. The confinement of the frame draws attention to the lie of the canvas and the seduction of idealised Beauty. In juxtaposing these ideas in a single image Magritte playfully questions what we assume we’re looking at- one of his greatest strengths as an artist. It would be easy to appropriate this image as the calling card of one of the Surrealist Boys- but it is more than that. Gender is an aspect of the painting’s multi-layered meanings, not the sum total of them. What it says to me as a woman and as an art historian in 2016 is not to be complicit in the lie- that “representation” is precisely that- with all its attendant dynamics of power. In the context of his oeuvre, Magritte is fundamentally (and very consciously) about how we see and create meaning. To dismiss him as a painter of dreams is to miss the point of his work entirely. There is a sense in which La Représentation enshrines a faceless, voiceless, Classical Feminine ideal in a gilt frame, but it also focuses our attention on the crafting of the image and the idea of received meaning, actively grappling with those perceived truths. Part of the SNGMA permanent collection, it’s a work I’ve returned to many times because it is such a contentious, brilliantly confrontational image that the viewer is forced to negotiate, rather than simply look at, admire or desire.

Being looked at by men is the traditional role assigned to women throughout the Western figurative tradition and the female muse is also a well-established trope in Art. However this passive companion to male engendered Creativity is challenged by the latitude of exploration Surrealism allows- made visible in the scope of this exhibition. Unlocking the unconscious through free association, automatic writing, assemblage and collage techniques creates a heightened sense of alternate reality. The free form craft of placing contradictory ideas beside each other in denial of the absolute asserts the political right to freedom of expression. The beauty of Surrealism is that in its purest form, it brings us into confrontation with ourselves on an intensely psychological level; individually and collectively. It is possible to perceive the world within and without in new ways. There are many sublime examples of this kind of confrontation in the show, presenting alternatives to received ideas, passive Femininity and the supremacy of the Great (male) Artist. In Picasso’s drawing La fin d’un monster / Death of a Monster (1937, Pencil on paper, Formerly collection of Roland Penrose, SNGMA, Edinburgh) the Minotaur is confronted by his monstrous reflection, revealed to him by Athene, the Goddess of wisdom, holding a mirror to his face in one hand and a phallic spear in the other. It’s an image of male ego, a wildly virile masculine persona confronted by his fallibility and by an alternative state of being. Athene appears as a balancing force of grace, intellect, action and conscious awareness within the composition. In Jungian terms she is a projection of Feminine anima within the male psyche that in Picasso’s case is screaming to be assimilated, rather than being exploded into Cubist fragments as a potential threat. Argentine artist Leonor Fini’s (1907-1996) foreground vision of Feminine self-possession; The Alcove (1939, Oil on canvas, West dean College, part of the Edward James Foundation) is another magnificent example of foreground creative Femininity (in this case within and in front of the canvas. ) On painting Fini remarked: “I strike it, stalk it, try to make it obey me. Then in its disobedience, it forms something I like.” This intuitive, instinctual approach to making Art, acknowledging the artist as a conduit, is balanced by her undeniable mastery of the medium. As in so many Surrealist works, contradictory ideas dynamically co-exist and new ways of seeing emerge. In The Alcove Fini skilfully sets the historical stage of expectation and then subverts it completely, creating tension and the need for imaginative resolution in the mind of the viewer. In Dadaist Art that tension is a knife edge, much more overtly critical of the powers that be-the inclusion of work by George Grosz in the exhibition gives the viewer a potent taste of this quality.

Also created during the inter-war /Weimar period, Hannah Höch’s collage Aus einem ethnographischen Museum / From the Collection: From an Ethnographical Museum (1929, collage, SNGMA, Edinburgh, Bequeathed by Gabrielle Keiller 1995) is a fascinating visualisation of Feminine and Ethnological “otherness”. Höch’s striking image combines an indigenous carved mask like the head of a deity with a female eye cut from a contemporary magazine. Colonised into Modern Art the human figure looks startled, looking over her shoulder with a quizzical, alarmed expression, also confronting the viewer in that moment with their own act of seeing and attributing meaning. There is a distinct feeling of violation conveyed by this disembodied eye set at a distressed angle, recalling the often painted Biblical tale of Susannah and the Elders; the self-consciousness anxiety of being seen as an object to be conquered and being subjected to a gaze which essentially frames you as subordinate. The body which is androgynous and child-like is combined with a bestial foot and tiny stool-like plinth beneath; a hybrid of ancient knowing, innocence, naivety and instinct. Höch positions the figure on an abstract, cage –like ground of geometric forms, juxtaposing Western ideas about Primitivism with collectively inherited values of a dominant “civilized” tribe. She calls into question Western attitudes towards “the other”, presenting the statuette object, “From the Collection: From the Ethnographical Museum” as a conscious human presence. It’s the emotional impact of Höch’s collage that hits you viscerally, the museum type categorisation turned on its head by Feminine resistance.

Resistance to the dominant gaze takes many unexpected forms in the exhibition. Salvador Dali ‘s The City of Drawers (Study for The Anthropomorphic Cabinet , 1936, Pen and Indian ink on paper , Private Collection, Formerly collection of Edward James) is a surprisingly insightful image of modernity. The female nude in the foreground extends her decaying arm and palm as if to ward off persistent assault. Her torso is a construction of drawers, drawer knobs and a key hole becoming erogenous, her face buried in the top drawer as if bowed in sorrowful resignation. Only a tattered rag can be seen coming out of the seemingly empty inner structure. The eye of the viewer is led by her hand into the mid ground of curvaceous discarded drawers, then into the distance where two seated women are similarly composed, one of them searching for herself in the open top drawer of her chest. Beyond we see gentile silhouettes moving through a cityscape, the reality of the foreground more vivid and arresting than the receding world of urban familiarity. This image of Dali’s Anthropomorphic Cabinet; a reclining Venus transformed by Freud’s theories, embodying an inner world of unconscious drives, is also an image of society. In the painted version a well to do woman in silhouette walks away into the background as if in denial of the open drawers of psychic revelation revealed by her other (or collective) self in the foreground. The element of display here is more complex than a reclining Venus arranged for seduction and the result more unsettling; a personification of civilization in decay.

It would be impossible to talk about the feminine aspects of this show and not address the elephant in the room; i.e. the male surrealist preoccupation with the Feminine as object(s) of desire. The most disturbing manifestation of this tendency towards sexual objectification is undoubtedly the work of Hans Bellmer. In La poupée / The Doll (Aluminium with gold-patinated bronze base, 1936/1965 Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg/ Pietzsche Collection) he utilises the seductive high shine patina of a lustrous, reflective metal sculpture, elevating the repulsive hybridised twin form of a pubescent girl/ doll onto a plinth. Engineered to satisfy his own gaze, Bellmer confronts the viewer with the framing devices of high art, introducing in the context of the gallery space an image of dominance, power and sexual objectification. The girl hinges in upon herself as a contorted, inverted object, dehumanised and mechanistic, beyond Nature but subject to the artist’s nature and will. More disturbing still is the placement of Bellmer’s sculpted dolls in different settings, recorded photographically by the artist like sociopathic trophies. La poupée / The Doll (1935, Gelatin and silver print, The Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, Berlin.) is an example of Surrealism in its darkest form; projected fantasies realised in an assemblage of objects, arranged for gratification of the artist but also by implication, the viewer in the act of looking. Even if we turn away in disgust, the feeling is still of complicity in that white columned Art space. What Bellmer brings the 2016 viewer face to face with is a culture of consumption and sexualisation that is aesthetically and socially accepted. His crafting of objects and images when coupled with his underlying subject matter calls Art itself into question. Although I find his work deeply abhorrent, it is also a good example of work which makes the viewer confront the darkest corners of the human psyche, manifested today in the Surreality of cyberspace or the dark web where any desire can be made real. The work of Hans Bellmer reminds us that freedom of expression, now so prevalent in the visual/ textual bombardment of our digital age, also comes with responsibility to something greater than the gratification of our own desires. Presented as objects of beauty Bellmer’s creations are incredibly sinister, but they are also windows into the human mind and what we are capable of as a species. Most of us would prefer not to look, to label the work and its maker, filing both away and thereby placing the internal threat outside ourselves. Perhaps in this way Bellmer is a Surrealist artist par excellence in making the unthinkable visible.

Marcel Duchamp’s Coin de chasteté/ Wedge of Chastity (1954/63, Bronze and dental plastic, SNGMA, Edinburgh, Bequeathed by Gabrielle Keiller 1995) is also an object of implied violence with hard bronze cleft into pink, glistening dental plastic. There is the suggestion of possession in the Wedge of Chastity; of female sexuality effectively plugged by the more permanent and more highly valued material of ancient bronze, over and above the disposability of plastic. Feuille de vigne femelle / Female Fig Leaf (1950/61, Bronze, SNGMA, Edinburgh, Bequeathed by Gabrielle Keiller 1995) is a more dualistic object; on the one hand enshrining a cast of female genitalia in bronze but also suggesting modesty, even shame in the fig leaf, recalling the Garden of Eden and by implication the Fall from grace initiated (according to the Old Testament) by Eve. Apparently the only way to keep female desire in check is to dam it. The dichotomy of Duchamp’s fig leaf as a representation of the Feminine lies in its disempowerment, functioning rather like a drain cover, whilst being an object cast in a permanently exposed, tactile state . Although I’m sure Duchamp would have viewed this object as an expression of eroticism, it feels like a medieval door nailed shut rather than blissfully opened in the spirit of free love.

Max Ernst’s painting Gala, Max and Paul 1923, oil on canvas, The Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, Berlin) is a fascinating image; a depiction of the ménage a trois between Ernst, Gala (Elena Ivanovna Diakonova), and her first husband, the poet Paul Éluard, representing the Feminine in an unexpectedly powerful light. Charged between the cool blues and rich ochre of Ernst’s palette, the female protagonist retains her mystery. She is an immediately foreground presence and remarkably underexposed. Her face is turning away from the viewer, half in shadow, becoming the ground of the painting. Anchored to a plinth like a Modernist sculpture, she also creates a sense of anticipation, movement and tension in the sheet that she holds by a thread which spills into the viewer’s space. At face value it’s a gesture of coquettish puppetry, Ernst visualising the human experience of having the world pulled out from under you by desire. But it is also an earthily sensual and grounded image, tangibly real in its abstraction. Ernst and Eluard appear as doll-like figures in the background, leaning into each other in intimate contemplation of Gala. Her svelte figure in a backless gown, appears like a mermaid, split and tapered down to the sensuous curve of her hand, which like her hollowed eye, draws the viewer deeper into the abyss of the background. She is resoundingly present, part of the depth of the painting and aware of her own power- there’s a sense of what is withheld as well as what is on display. The male figures appear school boyish and immature in relation to the world of the painting, which is her. The viewer is caught off balance by these dynamics and by the unexpected acknowledgement of Gala as an independent being. We are made aware of a mind, connected to her body – a presence which we never see in vacant portraits of Gala by her second husband Salvador Dali, who binds her erotically in his own pictorial technique.

Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik /A Little Night Music (1943, Oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London) is a beautiful example of revealing that which is hidden and bringing it into conscious awareness. It is a vision flawlessly executed by a truly masterful artist. On an otherworldly, red carpeted landing and stair case a decaying sunflower, petals strewn with creeping green stems aligns with the fourth in a series of numbered doors, left ajar and sunlit from within. Two doll-like girls, their hair suspended in mid-air as if submerged underwater stand adjacent to each other. One leans half undressed, slumbering in a doorway, a fallen petal in her hand. Acidic green walls contrast with the opposing warmth of her red jacket. The tattered clothing of the girl not facing us mirrors the forms of creeping stems, broken and beginning the process of decay. It is a subterranean image of burgeoning awareness, awakening in dreams. Tanning reflects the altered, transitional state of female adolescence, rendered in painterly hyper reality more perceptively real than life. Unlike Bellmer’s depictions, these pubescent girls inhabit their own interior world, un-beholden to the viewer and aligned with natural cycles of human growth. Tanning’s painting Voltage (1942, Oil on canvas, The Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, Berlin) also depicts a transformative process of becoming in female form. In the absence of the head, a coiled plait of blonde hair attached to the nipple exposes an internal circuitry of self-possession. The pale torso is contrasted with an oceanic background of turquoise green in the birth of a new kind of Venus. She beholds herself, disembodied blue eyes held in repose by an elegant, manicured hand. Like a headless Classical goddess of antiquity, the serpentine curves of drapery and hair adorn and animate the female body in a process of deconstruction. She is her own muse.

Leonora Carrington’s beautifully ethereal, Bosch-like vision The House Opposite (1945, Tempera on board, West Dean College, part of the Edward James Foundation) displays her delicate command of tempera. The house appears as a labyrinth of the mind rendered with the devotional detail and palette of an illuminated manuscript. Carrington’s conservative English upbringing informs Ladies Run There is a Man in the Rose Garden (1948, Tempera on wood, The Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, Berlin), a delightfully humorous but incredibly grounded image, which has comic kinship with the work of illustrator and designer Edward Gorey (1925-2000). Carrington’s juxtaposition of the walled garden inhabited by Edwardian ladies, invaded by a Green Man is an intricate, playful and extraordinary work, etched in ghostly negative, seemingly scratched out of a richly fecund, umber ground of timeless earth. The sky precipitates dawn and groups of associative figures animate narratives intertwined in non-linear time. A heron, cat and monkey with their attendant meanings sitting on the chest / stomach of an outstretched figure in bed and the positive silhouettes of birds and animals receding into the background create a natural sense of archetypal. This image is all the ancient knowing invested in prehistoric Rock Art colliding with the genteel restraint of illustrative storytelling. One of the escaping veiled ladies points with her umbrella to a fishing hook suspended like a noose, while making an exit out of the frame on the far right, a woman in a broad skirt wearing a tribal headdress disappears into negative space. There’s an imprint here, like the ancient Aboriginal technique of blowing paint over the hand to recreate the imaginative space left by the Dreaming of our ancestors. Carrington was and is a Surrealist master who was dismayed at being described as a “Female Artist”. Unfortunately things have not yet progressed sufficiently in the Art World to make the term completely irrelevant in terms of acquisition, display and public awareness.

I loved this show for its richness and expanded frame of reference, the archival material bringing context to the work and the imperative of collecting Art in an attempt to understand. As dreamlike as many of these images might be, they are built on strong, resistant foundations that still have the power to make us question everything we think we know about the world and ourselves. One of the dynamics that makes this exhibition so strong is engagement with the Feminine on the part of private collectors, curators and within the creative process of individual artists, both male and female. Spend time in this exhibition, allow your perceptions to shift and bring that heightened awareness into your life.